Baking in Process Improvements
Today I want to talk about process improvements with an example.
Recently, a relative of mine was busy preparing for a garage sale. She had also wanted to make a double batch of chocolate chip cookies, but ran out of time. So I offered to make the cookies with her daughter, who I will call Spunky Shoes. She handed me a printout of the recipe, which I have listed below:
Soft and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies(from Danielle Rye’s
Getting Started With Zephyr: DTS vs DTSI vs Overlays
Devicetrees can be daunting for traditional embedded software engineers that are new to Zephyr. In this blog post, I address these fears and show how navigating Devicetrees can be much easier if you understand that they represent the layered structure of the underlying hardware.
Breaking AES with an Oscilloscope
AES is a powerful encryption algorithm that protects some our most important secrets. But did you know that many devices are inadvertently leaking the value of their private key through their power pins?! Join me in this special preview of my upcoming workshop at the Embedded Systems Summit (14-16 October 2025 in San Jose, CA) as we explore the world of hardware security and discover just how easy it could be to break AES encryption with only an oscilloscope and some math.
Why Containers Are the Cheat Code for Embedded DevOps
Embedded software teams have long accepted toolchain setup as “part of the job,” but it’s a hidden productivity killer. Manual installs waste days, slow onboarding, and derail CI pipelines with “works on my machine” issues. While enterprise software solved this years ago with containerization, many embedded teams are still stuck replicating fragile environments. Containers offer a proven fix: a portable, reproducible build environment that works identically on laptops and CI servers. No brittle scripts, mismatched versions, or wasted time—just code that builds. IAR has gone further by delivering pre-built, performance-tuned Docker images for Arm, RISC-V, and Renesas architectures, ready for GitHub Actions and CI/CD pipelines. For regulated industries, containers simplify audits and compliance by enabling validation once and reuse everywhere. The result: faster onboarding, consistent builds, and stronger safety assurance. Containers aren’t a luxury—they’re the cheat code embedded teams need to modernize DevOps and compete effectively.
The Embedded Systems Summit - Risk Free Early Bird
The inaugural Embedded Systems Summit is just weeks away, taking place October 14-16, 2025 in Silicon Valley. With only 70 seats available, the Summit is designed to be intentionally intimate, giving attendees a rare chance to learn, connect, and exchange ideas with some of the top minds in embedded systems.
Day one kicks off with a full-day Zephyr Bootcamp, followed by two packed days of talks and workshops on real-world embedded challenges.
To make it easier for you to register early...
The Embedded Systems Summit 2025 - Registration are now open!
It’s happening!
I am extremely excited to announce that registration is officially open for the inaugural Embedded Systems Summit (ESS)!
The Summit will take place October 14–16, 2025 in the heart of Silicon Valley at the Sonesta Silicon Valley.
It's a fantastic feeling for Jacob Beningo and I to see our vision of an in-person event materialize. Our goal with the ESS is to create an in-person event that will:
- Feature some of the most popular speakers from the Embedded...
Getting Started With Zephyr: Using GDB To Fix a Driver Bug
In this blog post, I show how to use GDB to debug an issue encountered with a TSL2591 light sensor driver in Zephyr. The fix was submitted and successfully incorporated into The Zephyr Project.
Call for Speakers: Inaugural Embedded Systems Summit
Jacob and I are thrilled to announce that the Call for Speakers is now officially open for the inaugural Embedded Systems Summit that will take place October 14-16, 2025 in Silicon Valley!
We’re building a highly practical, engineer-to-engineer event designed to empower and inspire engineers working on real-world embedded systems challenges, and we’re looking for speakers who share that vision.
If you’re passionate about embedded systems and have real-world insights, technical know-how,...
The Inaugural Embedded Systems Summit is Coming to Silicon Valley!
Jacob Beningo and I couldn't be more excited to announce the very first Embedded Systems Summit - an in-person conference set to take place in the heart of Silicon Valley from October 14th to 16th, 2025!
Why are we creating the Embedded Systems Summit?
We’ve been contemplating the idea of an in-person gathering to complement our online offerings for quite some time. While we absolutely love organizing online conferences (and will continue doing so for years to come), nothing beats...
Beware of Analog Switch Leakage Current
I’ve written about leakage current of CMOS circuitry several times previously, but it’s always been as a warning tossed aside, something to scare inexperienced youngsters, like the boogeyman or the chupacabra. Today I want to show you a specific example.
Let’s say I want to make a switchable reference that takes a 1.25V reference voltage and either buffers it or multiplies it by a gain of 2. I have three ideas of circuits that will do this:
In all cases, I have a...
Development of the MOS Technology 6502: A Historical Perspective
One ubiquitous microprocessor of the late 1970s and 1980s was the MOS Technology MCS 6502. I included a section on the development of the 6502 in Part 2 of Supply Chain Games, and have posted it as an excerpt here, as I believe it is deserving in its own right.
(Note: MOS Technology is pronounced with the individual letters M-O-S “em oh ess”,[1] not “moss”, and should not be confused with another semiconductor company,
VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 2 - VHDL coding
In part 1 of this series we focused on the hardware design, including some of the VHDL definitions of the I/O characteristics of the CPLD part. In part 2, we will describe the VHDL logic of the CPLD for this design.
With any design, the first step to gather the requirements for the job at hand. From part 1 of this article, I have copied two sections that address some of the requirements for the CPLD design.
The data acquisition engine has the...
VHDL tutorial
When I was first introduced to "Programmable Logic" several years ago, it was an answer to many of the challenges that I was struggling with. Though the parts were primitive by today's standards (simple PALs verses FPGA), they were an extremely cost effective tool addressing the need for specialized logic blocks.
I have continued to incorporate these powerful blocks into many of my latest designs. My current favorite part line is the Xilinx CoolRunner series (XC2Cxxx). In this...
VHDL tutorial - part 2 - Testbench
In an earlier article I walked through the VHDL coding of a simple design. In this article I will continue the process and create a test bench module to test the earlier design. The Xilinx ISE environment makes it pretty easy to start the testing process. To start the process, select "New Source" from the menu items under "Project". This launches the "New Source Wizard". From within the Wizard select "VHDL Test Bench" and enter the name of the new module (click 'Next' to...
Supply Chain Games: What Have We Learned From the Great Semiconductor Shortage of 2021? (Part 3)
Hello again! Today we’re going to take a closer look at Moore’s Law, semiconductor foundries, and semiconductor economics — and a game that explores the effect of changing economics on the supply chain.
We’ll try to answer some of these questions:
- What does Moore’s Law really mean, and how does it impact the economics of semiconductor manufacturing?
- How does the foundry business model work, and how is it affected by the different mix of technology...
VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 1 - Hardware
In previous posts I described some simple VHDL examples. This time let's try something a little more complex. This is part one of a multiple part article. This is intended to be a detailed description of one of several initial designs that I developed for a client. This design never made it into a product, but a similar design was used and is currently being produced. As a considerable amount of work was put into this effort, I decided to share this design...
Lost Secrets of the H-Bridge, Part V: Gate Drives for Dummies
Learn the most important issues in power MOSFET and IGBT gate drives: - Transistor behavior during switching - Calculating turn-on and turn-off times - Passive components used between gate drive IC and transistor - Reverse recovery - Capacitively-coupled spurious turn-on - Factors that influence a good choice of turn-on and turn-off times - Gate drive supply voltage management - Bootstrap gate drives - Design issues impacting reliability
VHDL tutorial - Creating a hierarchical design
In earlier blog entries I introduced some of the basic VHDL concepts. First, developing a function ('VHDL tutorial') and later verifying and refining it ('VHDL tutorial - part 2 - Testbench' and 'VHDL tutorial - combining clocked and sequential logic'). In this entry I will describe how to...
Cracking the (embedded) Coding Interview
You never forget the day you land your first job.
The thrill of receiving that call from your recruiter to tell you that you bagged your dream role! The relief when you finally see the offer letter you’ve been working towards for years. The pride in your parents' voices when you call home and say “Hey look Ma, I’ve made it!”
But before that, there’s the grueling screening process to get through. Tech interviews often last up to three months and companies can have five...
VHDL tutorial - combining clocked and sequential logic
In an earlier article on VHDL programming ("VHDL tutorial" and "VHDL tutorial - part 2 - Testbench", I described a design for providing a programmable clock divider for a ADC sequencer. In this example, I showed how to generate a clock signal (ADCClk), that was to be programmable over a series of fixed rates (20MHz, 10MHz, 4MHz, 2MHz, 1MHz and 400KHz), given a master clock rate of 40MHz. A reader of that article had written to ask if it was possible to extend the design to...
Introduction to Microcontrollers - Beginnings
Welcome to this Introduction to Microcontroller Programming tutorial series. If you are looking to learn the basics of embedded programming for microcontrollers (and a bit of embedded hardware design as well), I hope these tutorials will help you along that journey. These are my first postings here, and I am writing this tutorial series because over the years I have seen countless newbies asking the same questions and tripping over the same stumbling blocks, and I thought I might be able to...
Analyzing the Linker Map file with a little help from the ELF and the DWARF
When you're writing firmware, there always comes a time when you need to check the resources consumed by your efforts - perhaps because you're running out of RAM or Flash or you want to optimize something. The map file generated by your linker is a useful tool to aid in the resource analysis. I wanted to filter and sort the data generated in an interactive way so I wrote a C# WinForms application that reads the data from the map and presents it in a list view (using the awesome
VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 3 - VHDL testbench
In part 1 of this series we focused on the hardware design, including some of the VHDL definitions of the I/O characteristics of the CPLD part. In part 2, we described the VHDL logic of the CPLD for this design. In part 3, we will show the entire VHDL design and the associated tests used to prove that we have, in fact, designed what we started out to design.
First, let's pull all of the pieces of the prior design together into a...
MSP430 Launchpad Tutorial - Part 2 - Interrupts and timers
What is an "interrupt"? It is a signal that informs our MCU that a certain event has happened, causing the interruption of the normal flow of the main program and the execution of an "interrupt routine", that handles the event and takes a specified action.
Interrupts are essential to avoid wasting the processor's valuable time in polling loops, waiting for external events (in fact they are used in Real-Time Operating Systems,
How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one
Today, pretty much everyone has a CPU, a DSP and a GPU, buried somewhere in their PC, phone, car, etc. Most don't know or care that they bought any of these, but they did.
Will everyone, at some future point, also buy an FPGA? The market size of FPGAs today is about 1% of the annual global semiconductor sales (~$3B vs ~$300B). Will FPGA eventually...
Chebyshev Approximation and How It Can Help You Save Money, Win Friends, and Influence People
Well... maybe that's a stretch. I don't think I can recommend anything to help you win friends. Not my forte.
But I am going to try to convince you why you should know about Chebyshev approximation, which is a technique for figuring out how you can come as close as possible to computing the result of a mathematical function, with a minimal amount of design effort and CPU power. Let's explore two use cases:
- Amy has a low-power 8-bit microcontroller and needs to compute \( \sqrt{x} \)...
MSP430 LaunchPad Tutorial - Part 4 - UART Transmission
Today we are going to learn how to communicate using UART with the Launchpad. For this purpose I will replace the default microcontroller that comes with the board with the MSP430G2553. It is the most powerful device in the MSP430 Value Line and it comes with an integrated hardware UART module, along with 16 Kb of Flash memory, 512 bytes of SRAM and an 8-channel, 10 bit ADC.
UART communication can be useful when dealing with sensors: as a basic example, we could...
How to Read a Power MOSFET Datasheet
One of my pet peeves is when my fellow engineers misinterpret component datasheets. This happened a few times recently in separate instances, all involving power MOSFETs. So it’s time for me to get on my soapbox. Listen up!
I was going to post an article on how to read component datasheets in general. But MOSFETs are a good place to start, and are a little more specific. I’m not the first person to write something about how to read datasheets; here are some other good...
Understanding and Preventing Overflow (I Had Too Much to Add Last Night)
Happy Thanksgiving! Maybe the memory of eating too much turkey is fresh in your mind. If so, this would be a good time to talk about overflow.
In the world of floating-point arithmetic, overflow is possible but not particularly common. You can get it when numbers become too large; IEEE double-precision floating-point numbers support a range of just under 21024, and if you go beyond that you have problems:
for k in [10, 100, 1000, 1020, 1023, 1023.9, 1023.9999, 1024]: try: ...MSP430 Launchpad Tutorial - Part 1 - Basics
TI's LaunchPad is a complete MSP430 development environment: all you have to do is download and install CCS IDE (login required), connect your G2231-ready LaunchPad to your computer with the included mini-usb cable, and you are ready to code!
Texas Instrument MSP430 LaunchPadSo, let's see how to start a new project in Code Composer Studio. This IDE is derived from Eclipse, so if you used it before you shouldn't have much problems.
We'll write a simple program that will...
The Embedded Systems Summit - Risk Free Early Bird
The inaugural Embedded Systems Summit is just weeks away, taking place October 14-16, 2025 in Silicon Valley. With only 70 seats available, the Summit is designed to be intentionally intimate, giving attendees a rare chance to learn, connect, and exchange ideas with some of the top minds in embedded systems.
Day one kicks off with a full-day Zephyr Bootcamp, followed by two packed days of talks and workshops on real-world embedded challenges.
To make it easier for you to register early...
The Embedded Systems Summit 2025 - Registration are now open!
It’s happening!
I am extremely excited to announce that registration is officially open for the inaugural Embedded Systems Summit (ESS)!
The Summit will take place October 14–16, 2025 in the heart of Silicon Valley at the Sonesta Silicon Valley.
It's a fantastic feeling for Jacob Beningo and I to see our vision of an in-person event materialize. Our goal with the ESS is to create an in-person event that will:
- Feature some of the most popular speakers from the Embedded...
Call for Speakers: Inaugural Embedded Systems Summit
Jacob and I are thrilled to announce that the Call for Speakers is now officially open for the inaugural Embedded Systems Summit that will take place October 14-16, 2025 in Silicon Valley!
We’re building a highly practical, engineer-to-engineer event designed to empower and inspire engineers working on real-world embedded systems challenges, and we’re looking for speakers who share that vision.
If you’re passionate about embedded systems and have real-world insights, technical know-how,...
The Inaugural Embedded Systems Summit is Coming to Silicon Valley!
Jacob Beningo and I couldn't be more excited to announce the very first Embedded Systems Summit - an in-person conference set to take place in the heart of Silicon Valley from October 14th to 16th, 2025!
Why are we creating the Embedded Systems Summit?
We’ve been contemplating the idea of an in-person gathering to complement our online offerings for quite some time. While we absolutely love organizing online conferences (and will continue doing so for years to come), nothing beats...
2025 Embedded Online Conference: Your Guide to This Year's Schedule
Welcome to the 2025 Embedded Online Conference! As in previous years, the event features a rich mix of pre-recorded on-demand talks and live Zoom sessions including Keynotes, Workshops and Panel Discussions. We've carefully curated the schedule to deliver valuable technical content across a wide range of embedded systems topics.
New this year: Most live Q&A sessions will be held as track-based group discussions rather than individual speaker Q&As. These sessions will be moderated by Jacob...
2024 Embedded Online Conference's Schedule
Welcome to the 2024 Embedded Online Conference! Like with previous years, this year's event will be a mix of pre-recorded on-demand sessions and live Zoom sessions. We've carefully curated the schedule to ensure that you have access to a wealth of valuable content throughout the week.
Most talks will be released on-demand, while most workshops and keynotes will be done live on Zoom. There will also be multiple live 20-minute-long Q&A sessions happening throughout the week, providing you...
EOC 2024 - I Will Attend Giveaways!
With the Embedded Online Conference just around the corner, we are very excited to announce an opportunity for you to win one of many amazing prizes, thanks to the generous contributions of DigiKey, Jetperch and Saleae!
For a chance to win one of the following prizes, all you have to do is help us with spreading the word about the conference.
Prize: LulzBot Mini...Call for Bloggers!
Are you passionate about embedded systems? Do you have valuable insights, tips, or stories to share with the embedded community? Do you want to reach a large and engaged audience of embedded enthusiasts and professionals? We are currently looking at adding a few more inspired writers to our team of bloggers.
Get Involved: Contribute Quiz Questions for the Embedded Systems Community for a Chance to Win a LAP-C Pro!
Submit a Quiz Question for a chance to win a Zeroplus Lac-C Pro!
Free Sessions @ the 2023 Embedded Online Conference
Although the 2023 Embedded Online Conference will officially start only on Monday 04/24, today we are pre-releasing all Theatre Talks and Demos in order to give attendees a headstart over the weekend on a very busy program.
The good news is, you don't need a paid registration to access theatre talks and demos. All you have to do is create an account on the EOC website and skip the payment part.
Here are the 37 sessions that you can watch for...
